Get your Not How This Works gear in the Techdirt store on Threadless »We deal with a lot of... incorrect takes here at Techdirt. Whether it's a technological issue, a business concept, a legal question, or some combination thereof, there's always someone espousing an idea that is wrong in almost every respect (see: the current discourse around Section 230). So today we're launching our latest line of Techdirt gear featuring a general purpose reply that we've found ourselves screaming (internally or otherwise) in many such situations: That's Not How Any Of This Works.As always, both designs are available on t-shirts, hoodies, sweaters and other apparel — plus various cool accessories and home items including buttons, phone cases (for many iPhone and Galaxy models), mugs, tote bags, notebooks, and of course face masks.Check out this and our other gear in the Techdirt store on Threadless »

Get your Not How This Works gear in the Techdirt store on Threadless »We deal with a lot of... incorrect takes here at Techdirt. Whether it's a technological issue, a business concept, a legal question, or some combination thereof, there's always someone espousing an idea that is wrong in almost every respect (see: the current discourse around Section 230). So today we're launching our latest line of Techdirt gear featuring a general purpose reply that we've found ourselves screaming (internally or otherwise) in many such situations: That's Not How Any Of This Works.As always, both designs are available on t-shirts, hoodies, sweaters and other apparel — plus various cool accessories and home items including buttons, phone cases (for many iPhone and Galaxy models), mugs, tote bags, notebooks, and of course face masks.Check out this and our other gear in the Techdirt store on Threadless »

If Trump Wins...For Republicans, bashing “Big Tech” has become as central to the Culture War as bashing the “Big Three Networks” once was. Demanding “neutrality” from social media companies has become what “net neutrality” has been for Democrats: the issue that sucks up all the oxygen in the room — except far more politically useful.ISPs aren’t in the content moderation business, but social media would be unusable without it. (Just try using 8Kun or Gab!) Democrats have always struggled to identify real-world examples of net neutrality violations, but Republicans find “anti-conservative bias” everywhere, everyday. Content moderation at the scale of billions of posts is wildly imperfect, so anyone can find examples of decisions that seem unfair. But Republicans won’t settle for mere “neutrality.” They want to end Section 230’s legal protections for moderating hate speech, misinformation, using fake accounts to game algorithms, and most foreign election interference. All of these tend to benefit Republicans, so moderating them seems to prove the claim that “Big Tech” is out to get conservatives.This won’t just be empty rhetoric anymore. Making every tech issue about “bias” will make most tech legislation impossible, but Trump won’t really need new legislation. He’ll finally weaponize the two independent agencies that regulate tech: the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission. Their current chairmen are traditional Republicans and serious lawyers uninterested in playing political games. But in August, Trump abruptly withdrew the renomination of Republican stalwart Mike O’Rielly after he obliquely criticized Trump’s Executive Order demanding political “neutrality” of social media. Trump quickly nominated the junior administration staffer behind the White House’s crackdown. No one should doubt that the next FCC and FTC chairmen will be Trump loyalists unencumbered by legal or constitutional scruples — and eager to turn the screws on Trump’s “enemies.” Each agency will become ever more a political battleground in which "tech" issues serve as proxy war for deeper cultural conflict.If Biden Wins...Trump called “Sleepy Joe” a tool of the “radical, socialist left.” Biden insisted his primary victory was a mandate for centrist pragmatism. Perhaps nowhere will Biden’s leadership be tested more than in tech policy.Congress hasn’t passed substantial tech legislation since 1996 — and even that overhaul of the Communications Act (of 1934!) mostly reflected pre-Internet assumptions and fears. Congress used to make regular course-corrections through biennial reauthorization of federal agencies — but stopped in 1998, the year Congress became pure political spectacle. The FCC and FTC have since been left to improvise. The FCC’s long been a “junior varsity Congress” — same political baggage, no electoral accountability. The more serious FTC is trending that way. Each change of the White House means increasingly large shifts in tech policy.These problems are as thorny as our broken judicial nomination process — and equally unlikely to be corrected through our broken legislative process. If Biden wants to be remembered for resolving them, he’ll need to do for tech what he’s proposed for the courts: convene an expert bipartisan commission with a clear mandate to develop once-in-a-century legislation, and then get ‘er done.Biden’s nominations for FCC and FTC Chairs will reveal whether he’s genuinely interested in leading on tech — or content, like Trump and Obama, to exploit tech issues to excite his base. Strong Chairs in Biden’s mold could build Congressional consensus for significant, but viable, and therefore moderate, legislation. But if he picks bomb-throwers over problem-solvers, we’ll have four more years of the same digital culture wars — and creating a stable digital-era regulatory framework may have to wait several more presidencies.Section 230If Trump Wins...Republican fulmination about “anti-conservative bias” will continue to escalate. Don’t expect Republicans to pass any legislation. But they’ve always been more interested in stoking resentment among their base — and using threats of legal action to coerce large tech companies to change their content moderation practices in ways that help Republicans.The FCC will proceed with a rulemaking to sharply limit Section 230’s protections. The only question is whether Ajit Pai issues a more restrained proposal on transparency mandates before he leaves the FCC. If not, Brendan Carr (or whoever Trump might appoint to replace Pai) could propose most or all of what NTIA has asked for. This dynamic will make it difficult for bipartisan legislation to pass amending 230, but something like the EARN IT Act and other amendments targeted at unlawful content might pass.If Biden Wins…Many Republicans will blame “Big Tech” for their losses, and claim that “election interference” (by Big Tech) delegitimized the new administration. They’ll do everything they can to deter content moderation beyond narrow categories of porn, dirty words, illegal content, promoting terrorism, self harm, and harassment (narrowly defined). Most Democrats want exactly the opposite: to coerce tech companies into moderating misinformation as a condition of maintaining their 230 protections. There simply is no common ground here.So unless Democrats win enough Senate seats to abolish the filibuster, the debate over content moderation won’t be resolved anytime soon. Instead, Democrats will focus on liability for third-party content that isn’t moderated — which is what nearly all 230 cases are actually about. The EARN IT Act already has bipartisan support, as does making 230 protection contingent on removing unlawful content, and requiring websites to prove that their practices are “reasonable.” Each is deeply problematic, but practical details of real-world implementation don’t seem to matter much.Biden has said he wants to “revoke” Section 230 “immediately,” but there’s little reason to expect repeal to happen. Instead, expect him to focus on “hold[ing] social media companies accountable for knowingly platforming falsehoods,” as a Biden spokesman put it after Trump’s Executive Order in May.Here, more than in any other area, an expert commission is the only way out of this debate. The issue is simply too complicated — both legally and technically — for Congress to handle.Net NeutralityIf Trump Wins...Status quo: The FCC will maintain its hands-off approach to broadband regulation and net neutrality legislation will remain stalled in Congress. At most, a Democratic House and Senate might pass legislation purporting to revive the 2015 Open Internet Order, but Trump would veto it — and it’s far from clear that’s even a valid way to legislate. Instead, expect activists to focus on pushing for state-level broadband legislation. The courts are unlikely to allow that so long as the FCC retains broad preemption. But for some activists, the point has always been to keep the fight going forever, not to actually win in court.If Biden Wins…Even a centrist FCC Chair would face overwhelming activist pressure to revive the FCC’s 2015 Open Internet Order. But will they want to be remembered merely for playing yet another round of Title II ping-pong — or for finally convincing Congress to resolve this issue? There’s been a bipartisan consensus on the core of net neutrality since Republican Chairman Michael Powell gave his “Four Freedoms” speech in 2004. Democratic Chairman Genachowski pushed hard for legislation. He resorted to issuing the 2010 Open Order only after Republicans pulled out of legislative talks, calculating that they’d have more leverage after the midterms.Resolving this issue could be the key to broader telecom reforms that Congress has been unable to tackle since passing the 1996 Telecom Act — a law based on markedly pre-digital assumptions about the future. Democrats should be careful not to overplay their hand: the D.C. Circuit decision upholding the FCC’s 2015 Order made clear that the FCC’s rules only applied to companies that held themselves out as offering “unedited” services anyway, meaning that ISPs could opt-out of Title II if they really wanted to.Tech & AntitrustIf Trump Wins...Expect more antitrust lawsuits like the Google suit. But if the Google suit is the strongest case this Administration has, they’re unlikely to win any significant remedies in court. And even if those suits do succeed, they’re unlikely to significantly address Republicans’ real concerns about “bias.” So don’t expect Republicans’ current “litigate but don’t legislate” approach to last long. Trump is famous for turning on a dime, and Congressional Republicans will face enormous pressure, especially if Democrats take the Senate, to “strengthen” the antitrust laws. Ken Buck’s minority report indicates where populist Republicans might find common ground with anti-corporate populists on the left.If Biden Wins…There’s enormous political pressure from all quarters to “do something” about antitrust. But don’t assume that legislation will be anywhere near as radical as what Congressional Democrats have proposed. Even Rep. David Cicilline’s much-hyped proposal to turn antitrust law on its head is careful to note that it represents only the views of his staff — not the Committee or its members.It’s one thing for Democrats to talk about flipping the burden of proof in merger cases, but giving the government such leverage would have, for example, made it easy for Trump to force AT&T to spin off CNN — or to make editorial changes as implicit conditions of the Time Warner deal. Democrats pushing such ideas simply haven’t thought through the implications of what they’re proposing. Do they really want to make it easier for Republicans to use the antitrust laws as political weapons against the media, both new and old? A more considered, serious approach from the administration would focus on increased funding, more aggressive enforcement, and carefully targeted statutory changes.Federal Privacy LegislationIf Trump Wins…Status quo: Absent a court decision striking down state privacy laws on dormant commerce grounds — hard cases to win, which usually take years — Republicans will continue to insist on national privacy legislation to prevent every state from layering its own set of data rules on top of California’s. But Democrats have little political incentive to negotiate for any legislation that would displace California’s approach, which they claim as a win despite its glaring amateurishness and many practical pitfalls.If Biden Wins…If Democrats also take the Senate, they’ll have no excuse for not finally passing the comprehensive baseline privacy legislation they’ve talked about for years. Preemption should be an easier “give” for Democrats if they have more leverage in writing the legislation and are assured of handling at least the crucial first 3-4 years of enforcing the new law. Passing a federal law, even if it overlaps significantly with California’s, would allow the Administration to take credit for addressing the top complaint about “Big Tech”: not bigness per se, but a perceived lack of control over data collection.Treatment of Chinese Tech CompaniesIf Trump Wins… Status quo: The White House will raise legitimate concerns about Chinese tech companies giving the Chinese government access to private user data and influence over content moderation decisions. They’ll hype “deals” like TikTok’s partnership with Oracle, but Chinese entities will retain control. The only real winners will be American companies favored by the White House. It’ll be cronyist mercantilism veiled in talk of privacy and free speech. Republicans will increasingly find themselves in a quandary: the greatest beneficiaries of their push to hamstring American “Big Tech” companies will be Chinese companies that have achieved the scale necessary to expand into the U.S. market, as TikTok has done.If Biden Wins…Republicans will hammer the Biden Administration for any perceived weakness on China — especially when it comes to tech. Expect the White House to try to depoliticize CFIUS and treat the review process as more of a law enforcement exercise than policymaking driven by the White House. If Democrats are smart, they’ll try to insulate themselves from inevitable Republican attacks by drawing clearer statutory lines about foreign ownership of tech companies serving the U.S. market. The real test will come the first time CFIUS declines to take action against a Chinese company: will the White House intervene under political pressure?And If the Election is Contested...?If there’s no clear, quick election result, the stage will be set for the “mother of all battles” over online speech. If Trump and his supporters claim victory and insist that ballots that “changed the result on election night” must be fraudulent, “Big Tech” companies will apply warning labels to such content — and block paid ads making the same claims. Republicans will go absolutely ballistic. They’ll throw every legal theory they can against the wall. Don’t expect any of it to stick: website operators have a clear First Amendment right to reject, or put disclaimers around, third party content — just as newspapers do with letters to the editor. But that won’t stop Republicans from filing multiple lawsuits and complaints with federal regulators, including the Federal Election Commission. Expect the Trump administration to get creative in finding ways to “stick it” to tech companies in interregnum.As ugly and politicized as tech policy is today, if tech policy becomes wrapped up in a “Florida recount but worse” fight, we’ll quickly come to look back at today’s tech policy battles as mild by comparison.

Early last year, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals (which has more than its fair share of inexplicable decisions) released an inexplicable decision. The appeal arose from a lower court's dismissal of an injured cop's lawsuit against multiple parties over injuries he sustained when a protester threw a chunk of concrete at him.The pseudonymous cop sued a number of entities, including "Black Lives Matter," a Twitter hashtag, and activist DeRay Mckesson. His claims against the social movement and the social media sorting mechanic didn't survive. But the Fifth Circuit Court felt it was plausible -- under Louisiana state law -- that Mckesson was somehow responsible for the injuries sustained by the cop.According to the court, Mckesson should have known that leading protesters onto a highway would "provoke" a "confrontation" with law enforcement. Being aware of this potential provocation was enough for the court to revive Officer John Doe's idiotic attempt to hold Mckesson personally responsible for an act of violence committed by another person.That ridiculousness has now been undone by the Supreme Court. The nation's top court rolls back [PDF] the Fifth Circuit's inexplicable resurrection of the cop's misguided claims and sends it back down the judicial food chain. Allowing this decision to stand would do damage to the First Amendment and invite similarly misguided lawsuits from plaintiffs like this one -- people seeking to bleed the biggest litigation target, rather than the person who perpetrated the injurious act.The Supreme Court says the Fifth Circuit was right to recognize the issue, but was less correct in its handling of it.

Python is a high-level statically typed programming language that has become a trendsetter in the industry. It offers an easy syntax and a wide support for APIs and external packages. Python is extremely versatile it can be used for automation, GUI Applications, making websites, making web apps, and even for hacking! In the Python for Beginners course, you are going to learn the basics of the Python language and its fundamental concepts. It's on sale for $15.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

For a year now we've been writing about the disastrous impact of California's AB5 law that was designed to "protect" gig workers by basically outlawing nearly all freelance work in California, and requiring much of it to be only done by salaried employees. It has impacted many industries very hard, including freelance journalists. The author of the bill, Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez has been insultingly dismissive of those who have highlighted how much harm her bill has done.Though, as the complaints got louder and louder, she finally admitted that she might be open to some changes of parts of the bill. But, that's not what actually happened. Instead of fixing the larger bill, she just agreed to duct tape on a bunch of exemptions -- including for many of the industries that were most vocal about how much damage her bill was doing. This included freelance writers, photojournalists, freelance editors, copy editors, youth sports coaches, landscape architects, cartographers, and musicians among many others.Now, normally, if you have to go back to the drawing board to add a dozen and a half exemptions to the bill you just passed, it would be a sign that perhaps the bill itself is a problem. Indeed, lawyers are already saying that this "may be just the start of amendments to AB5 that will carve out other industries and occupations." And even the journalist exemptions are not complete and still have many journalists worried that they won't be able to freelance under the law.But what's really disgusting is that Lorena Gonzalez took to Twitter this weekend to celebrate the fact that the RIAA sent her a gold record as a "thank you" for carving musicians out of AB5. Of course, that's not the way she put it in her tweet about it:She says:

Space X has begun sending invites out to folks interested in participating in the company's Starlink low-orbit satellite broadband service. Users took to Reddit to note that Starlink is promising users speeds of 50-100 Mbps downstream for about $100 per month, plus $500 down for a connection terminal and antenna. The company is also promising significantly lower latency (20 to 40ms) than what you'll typically see with satellite broadband (often 200ms or higher). The best part, no monthly usage caps and overage fees (so far):

They're not screwing around with police reform in Virginia. Plenty of states and cities are reevaluating the way law enforcement money is spent and how agencies operate following nationwide protests against police brutality, but few of these discussions have resulted in solid changes. There's been more discussion than action. Virginia's governor is all about action, it would appear. As NBC12 reports, a long list of reforms has been signed into law by Governor Ralph Northam.

Several weeks ago, Microsoft bought Zenimax Media, the parent organization of Bethesda Softworks for over $7 billion. Bethesda is a celebrated studio best known for its Fallout and Elder Scrolls titles. Both series have long histories of being published across a wide range of gaming platforms, including the PC, PlayStation, and Xbox markets. Almost immediately after the deal, however, many gamers openly worried that Microsoft would warehouse the properties to either the PC or Xbox markets exclusively.The worry didn't cease when Kotaku interviewed Xbox chief Phil Spencer about the implications of the deal and Spencer's remarks were decidedly noncommittal.

Three years ago, Google jumped into the home security market. After a troubled development cycle it launched Nest Secure, a $500 home security system that competes with the likes of Abode and Simplisafe. But things didn't go quite as planned. Last year, the company took some deserved heat for failing to mention the system's "Nest Guard" keypad control base included a hidden microphone, creating ample paranoia among owners. Google also took heat for failing to really deploy updates at the same pace that other Nest products had seen, and for making changes that locked you into the Google ecosystem at the cost of interoperability.Last week the company quietly told Android Police it would be killing the Nest Secure completely. The company didn't really explain why, or what happens next, only to state that the product will still work. For now. Of course when Ars Technica pressed the company as to how long existing users can expect their expensive security service to get support, the company apparently couldn't be bothered to answer:

Remember Trump's ridiculous executive order to ban TikTok if it wasn't sold to an American company? Then there was a grifty non-deal in which Oracle agreed to host TikTok's new American subsidiary, though nothing about that deal appears to have been finalized, and the executive order was still somewhat in place. The first stage of the ban on the app was blocked by a judge in a lawsuit from TikTok itself. But that ruling did not (yet) block the second stage of the executive order which was set to go into effect this month.So some good news: that too has been blocked thanks to a lawsuit from three TikTok influencers: Douglas Marland, Cosette Rinab, and Alec Chambers. The three of them filed their lawsuit in September, right after the details of the executive order came out. I don't know much about these influencers, but I will note they had some high-powered, big time lawyers working the case for them (including the firm the judge in this very case worked at prior to being put on the bench...).The lawsuit noted that the three influencers were a comedian, a fashion creator and a musician "each of whom has developed a significant following by creating and posting content on TikTok." They argued that the executive order violated their 1st Amendment rights, creating prior restraint of their speech. As they correctly note, even on the flimsy "national security" basis that Trump, Wilbur Ross, and Mike Pompeo made in pushing through this executive order, you can't just ban speech broadly like that.

Let’s stop ignoring the obvious: broadband internet access service is a public utility and needs to be regulated as one.American consumers agree. A Consumer Reports survey from earlier this year found that four out of five (80 percent) consumers believe broadband service is as important as water and electricity. Indeed, broadband has become the essential service in the daily lives of 21st century consumers. The COVID-19 crisis has thrown this fact into sharp relief as many of us depend on an internet connection to work from home, attend virtual classrooms, receive medical care via telehealth services, stay connected with friends and family, and for entertainment.The pandemic has proven just how critical a reliable, fast and affordable internet connection is today. However, unlike water, electricity, or even phone service, broadband internet service is neither universally available, nor is it regulated to guarantee access, ensure fair prices, or promote competition in the marketplace.As a result, there exists a deeply troubling “digital divide” between those Americans who have and can afford internet service, and those who cannot. The divide is two-pronged, as both access and affordability determine whether consumers are able to get online. Access is meant as a home wired for broadband internet, and affordability is determined by whether a consumer can pay the price for service demanded by the internet service provider (ISP).Unfortunately, those in charge at the Federal Communications Commission have proven incapable of bridging this divide. In fact, the decision a few years ago to reclassify broadband as an “information service” instead of what it obviously is, a “telecommunications service” has practically removed the Commission from any meaningful oversight role over ISPs. The next Congress needs to rectify this wrong and enact a new framework to govern broadband service, ensuring that it is both accessible and affordable to consumers.To be sure, the FCC could restore its regulatory authority over broadband by reclassifying it as a telecommunication service. The 2005 Supreme Court decision in Brand X established that the Commission has the flexibility to make such classification decisions—decisions with real consequences for consumers that extend beyond esoteric legal exercises.The very question of whether broadband is an information service versus a telecommunications service has been at the heart of the current net neutrality struggle for almost two decades. At the risk of gross oversimplification, an information service classification roughly translates into fewer regulations. Conversely, a telecommunications service designation avails the FCC of a stronger set of tools rooted in common carrier authority, with powers to better foster competition, ensure non-discriminatory access, and put a cap on rates that are too expensive for consumers.The FCC correctly classified broadband as a telecommunications service in 2015 as part of its Open Internet Order, enabling the issuance of common sense net neutrality rules. This action was approved by a federal court in the 2016 USTelecom ruling. Unfortunately, all that was discarded when the current Commission reversed course a year later and decided to reclassify broadband once again, this time as an information service, as a fundamental part of its repeal of the 2015 net neutrality rules. Though obvious to us that broadband is a telecommunications service, the classification debate—read the lengthy justification for declassifying broadband in the Restoring Internet Freedom Order—has descended into a medieval exercise to determine how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.The back-and-forth war over net neutrality fought time and time again at the FCC must end. Make no mistake, ensuring an open internet is an important policy struggle, but the FCC’s failures reveal a deeper problem: how can we best regulate internet service supplied by ISPs, which is NOT to be conflated with regulating the internet, as is so often the lament from the anti-net neutrality crowd.The current status quo cannot be allowed to stand and it will not increase more broadband access at an affordable price. Absent much more than flimsy transparency requirements, ISPs are free from any real rules imposed by the FCC or Congress. Moreover, ISPs like Comcast and Charter are mostly insulated from competition—a study published this past summer revealed that these two companies alone maintain a monopoly over 47 million American consumers, and even more (an extra 33 million) if we disregard DSL as a real competitive choice in 2020. Adding to the misery, the rates charged by ISPs are totally inscrutable. Prices vary from neighborhood to neighborhood within the same city, and yet there’s no clear sense how prices are determined or if they’re consistent.Though FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and others ridiculed the 2015 Open Internet Order as “utility-style” regulation, consumers now recognize broadband service as exactly that: a utility. It should be governed as such to benefit consumers. Not ISPs.A new Congress will be sworn in next January. It can settle this debate once and for all. We can no longer endure the seesawing classification debate at the FCC, the winner of which depends upon a Presidential election every four years. Therefore, legislation must be passed to grant the FCC new, clear authority to govern broadband service as a telecommunications service, an essential utility.Emboldened with the power to regulate broadband like a utility, the Commission can ensure affordability by applying price caps, especially where there is not effective competition and prices are too high. Alternatively, the FCC could spur competition by requiring ISPs to unbundle their networks to allow new entrants to offer service. Utility-style regulation could also be used to require deployment to underserved areas and to standardize service offerings to make sure consumers can afford a package to meet their everyday needs of remote work and online learning. Finally, as demonstrated by the 2015 Open Internet Order, utility regulation permits the FCC to require non-discriminatory access to ISP networks, the foundation for re-establishing strong net neutrality rules.Additionally, Congress must fund a massive internet infrastructure project to get broadband into the home of every American family. Estimates that 42 million Americans lack access to fixed broadband service is unacceptable in 2020. Kids trying to attend class online shouldn’t have to drive to a parking lot to use free WiFi offered by libraries, sports arenas, or fast food restaurants. And though rural areas typically suffer a lack of broadband access, it is also an urban problem. The Gotham Gazette recently reported that: “According to city data, 40% of households in the city -- home to roughly 3.4 million people -- don’t have both home and mobile internet connections, and 18% have neither.”Congress should further consider measures to make broadband affordable for all Americans. A CR survey from earlier this year found that consumers paid an average of $66 per month for internet service. Coupled with other costs and the hardships posed by the pandemic, this is simply too expensive for many families. Borrowing from a very old cable law, Congress could require ISPs to offer a “basic service” package for all consumers that provides affordable, reliable broadband at speeds that are required for today’s bandwidth-heavy applications. Comcast is already doing this in some fashion (originally as a condition to its acquisition of NBC Universal in 2011), so the idea is not exactly a stretch.These are but a few ideas to increase broadband access and affordability. This isn’t rocket science and it should not be a partisan issue. The internet has proven obvious and essential for Americans to succeed in the 21st century economy.With Congressional funding and a new grant of authority and purpose at the FCC to treat broadband like the essential utility service that it is, the government can—and must—connect many more Americans to the internet and to each other.Jonathan Schwantes is a senior policy counsel in Consumers Reports’ Washington DC office where he focuses on telecommunications issues affecting consumers in the broadband, television, media, and wireless markets.

Let’s stop ignoring the obvious: broadband internet access service is a public utility and needs to be regulated as one.American consumers agree. A Consumer Reports survey from earlier this year found that four out of five (80 percent) consumers believe broadband service is as important as water and electricity. Indeed, broadband has become the essential service in the daily lives of 21st century consumers. The COVID-19 crisis has thrown this fact into sharp relief as many of us depend on an internet connection to work from home, attend virtual classrooms, receive medical care via telehealth services, stay connected with friends and family, and for entertainment.The pandemic has proven just how critical a reliable, fast and affordable internet connection is today. However, unlike water, electricity, or even phone service, broadband internet service is neither universally available, nor is it regulated to guarantee access, ensure fair prices, or promote competition in the marketplace.As a result, there exists a deeply troubling “digital divide” between those Americans who have and can afford internet service, and those who cannot. The divide is two-pronged, as both access and affordability determine whether consumers are able to get online. Access is meant as a home wired for broadband internet, and affordability is determined by whether a consumer can pay the price for service demanded by the internet service provider (ISP).Unfortunately, those in charge at the Federal Communications Commission have proven incapable of bridging this divide. In fact, the decision a few years ago to reclassify broadband as an “information service” instead of what it obviously is, a “telecommunications service” has practically removed the Commission from any meaningful oversight role over ISPs. The next Congress needs to rectify this wrong and enact a new framework to govern broadband service, ensuring that it is both accessible and affordable to consumers.To be sure, the FCC could restore its regulatory authority over broadband by reclassifying it as a telecommunication service. The 2005 Supreme Court decision in Brand X established that the Commission has the flexibility to make such classification decisions—decisions with real consequences for consumers that extend beyond esoteric legal exercises.The very question of whether broadband is an information service versus a telecommunications service has been at the heart of the current net neutrality struggle for almost two decades. At the risk of gross oversimplification, an information service classification roughly translates into fewer regulations. Conversely, a telecommunications service designation avails the FCC of a stronger set of tools rooted in common carrier authority, with powers to better foster competition, ensure non-discriminatory access, and put a cap on rates that are too expensive for consumers.The FCC correctly classified broadband as a telecommunications service in 2015 as part of its Open Internet Order, enabling the issuance of common sense net neutrality rules. This action was approved by a federal court in the 2016 USTelecom ruling. Unfortunately, all that was discarded when the current Commission reversed course a year later and decided to reclassify broadband once again, this time as an information service, as a fundamental part of its repeal of the 2015 net neutrality rules. Though obvious to us that broadband is a telecommunications service, the classification debate—read the lengthy justification for declassifying broadband in the Restoring Internet Freedom Order—has descended into a medieval exercise to determine how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.The back-and-forth war over net neutrality fought time and time again at the FCC must end. Make no mistake, ensuring an open internet is an important policy struggle, but the FCC’s failures reveal a deeper problem: how can we best regulate internet service supplied by ISPs, which is NOT to be conflated with regulating the internet, as is so often the lament from the anti-net neutrality crowd.The current status quo cannot be allowed to stand and it will not increase more broadband access at an affordable price. Absent much more than flimsy transparency requirements, ISPs are free from any real rules imposed by the FCC or Congress. Moreover, ISPs like Comcast and Charter are mostly insulated from competition—a study published this past summer revealed that these two companies alone maintain a monopoly over 47 million American consumers, and even more (an extra 33 million) if we disregard DSL as a real competitive choice in 2020. Adding to the misery, the rates charged by ISPs are totally inscrutable. Prices vary from neighborhood to neighborhood within the same city, and yet there’s no clear sense how prices are determined or if they’re consistent.Though FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and others ridiculed the 2015 Open Internet Order as “utility-style” regulation, consumers now recognize broadband service as exactly that: a utility. It should be governed as such to benefit consumers. Not ISPs.A new Congress will be sworn in next January. It can settle this debate once and for all. We can no longer endure the seesawing classification debate at the FCC, the winner of which depends upon a Presidential election every four years. Therefore, legislation must be passed to grant the FCC new, clear authority to govern broadband service as a telecommunications service, an essential utility.Emboldened with the power to regulate broadband like a utility, the Commission can ensure affordability by applying price caps, especially where there is not effective competition and prices are too high. Alternatively, the FCC could spur competition by requiring ISPs to unbundle their networks to allow new entrants to offer service. Utility-style regulation could also be used to require deployment to underserved areas and to standardize service offerings to make sure consumers can afford a package to meet their everyday needs of remote work and online learning. Finally, as demonstrated by the 2015 Open Internet Order, utility regulation permits the FCC to require non-discriminatory access to ISP networks, the foundation for re-establishing strong net neutrality rules.Additionally, Congress must fund a massive internet infrastructure project to get broadband into the home of every American family. Estimates that 42 million Americans lack access to fixed broadband service is unacceptable in 2020. Kids trying to attend class online shouldn’t have to drive to a parking lot to use free WiFi offered by libraries, sports arenas, or fast food restaurants. And though rural areas typically suffer a lack of broadband access, it is also an urban problem. The Gotham Gazette recently reported that: “According to city data, 40% of households in the city -- home to roughly 3.4 million people -- don’t have both home and mobile internet connections, and 18% have neither.”Congress should further consider measures to make broadband affordable for all Americans. A CR survey from earlier this year found that consumers paid an average of $66 per month for internet service. Coupled with other costs and the hardships posed by the pandemic, this is simply too expensive for many families. Borrowing from a very old cable law, Congress could require ISPs to offer a “basic service” package for all consumers that provides affordable, reliable broadband at speeds that are required for today’s bandwidth-heavy applications. Comcast is already doing this in some fashion (originally as a condition to its acquisition of NBC Universal in 2011), so the idea is not exactly a stretch.These are but a few ideas to increase broadband access and affordability. This isn’t rocket science and it should not be a partisan issue. The internet has proven obvious and essential for Americans to succeed in the 21st century economy.With Congressional funding and a new grant of authority and purpose at the FCC to treat broadband like the essential utility service that it is, the government can—and must—connect many more Americans to the internet and to each other.Jonathan Schwantes is a senior policy counsel in Consumers Reports’ Washington DC office where he focuses on telecommunications issues affecting consumers in the broadband, television, media, and wireless markets.

It hasn't garnered that much public attention, but a couple weeks ago Shiva Ayyadurai decided to sue Massachusetts' Secretary William Galvin, claiming that efforts to have some of Shiva's tweets removed from Twitter violated the 1st Amendment. It may surprise many people to hear this, but I think Shiva has a point. And it actually raises some interesting (and somewhat new) 1st Amendment questions regarding social media, election disinformation, and the role of election officials in fighting disinformation online.Now, as background for this, many people reading this likely know that I spent over two years engaged in a legal fight with Shiva after he sued us over a series of articles we had written highlighting how his claim to have invented email is not supported by the evidence. The case was eventually settled with no money changing hands and with all of our stories remaining up. And we have since presented even more evidence that Shiva Ayyadurai did not invent email. You might think that this would make me immediately disagree with him in any legal fight, but as I did in writing my original pieces about him and as I do now, I'm looking at the actual details, not whether or not I like or agree with any particular individual.Over the last few years, Shiva has really embraced a Trumpian position in trying to build up a political base. He's been very supportive of the President, and in recent months has been an outspoken critic of both vaccines and Dr. Anthony Fauci. He's built up quite a large social media following and regularly espouses idea that I consider to be silly, misleading or unsupported by any evidence -- which seems somewhat par for the course, given his historical assertions. He's run for Senator in Massachusetts twice now. In 2018 he first sought the Republican nomination for the Senate to run against Elizabeth Warren, and then later switched to running as an Independent. After losing that race, he almost immediately declared that he would run again in 2020. He ran in the Republican primary, which he lost to Kevin O'Connor 158,590 votes to 104,782.Perhaps not surprisingly, he was not happy about this result, and started making a bunch of wild, unsupported allegations of election fraud:He then spent weeks trying to drum up a write-in campaign, while repeatedly using social media to allege election fraud. In an effort to show this, he filed some public records requests with Massachusetts, including (among other things) asking for scanned images of every ballot. In response, he was told that there were no responsive records because the machines that scan the ballots do not make images. In fact, the certification process flat out prohibits the machines from capturing ballot images. Furthermore, many of the machines don't even have the ability to capture images even if they could under Massachusetts laws.This was the email that was sent to him in response to the request:

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Everyone wants to do something about Section 230. It’s baffling how seldom we talk about what happens next. What if Section 230 is repealed tomorrow? Must Twitter cease fact-checking the President? Must Google display all search results in chronological order? Perhaps PragerU would finally have a tenable claim against YouTube; and Jason Fyk might one day return to showering the Facebook masses with his prized collection of pissing videos.Suffice to say, that’s not how any of this works.Contrary to what seems to be popular belief, Section 230 isn’t what’s stopping the government from pulling the plug on Twitter for taking down NY Post tweets or exposing bloviating, lying, elected officials. Indeed, without Section 230, plaintiffs with a big tech axe to grind still have a significant hurdle to overcome: The First Amendment.As private entities, websites have always enjoyed First Amendment—freedom of speech—protections for the content they choose (and choose not) to carry. What many erroneously (and ironically) declare as “censorship” is really no different from the editorial discretion enjoyed by newspapers, broadcasters, and your local bookstore. When it comes to the online world, we simply call it content moderation. The decision to fact-check, remove, reinstate, or simply leave content up, is wholly within the First Amendment’s purview. On the flip side, as private, non-government actors, websites do not owe their users the same First Amendment protection for their content.Or, as TechFreedom’s brilliant Ashkhen Kazaryan wisely puts it, the First Amendment protects Twitter from Trump, but not Trump from Twitter.What then is Section 230’s use if the First Amendment already stands in the way? Put simply, Section 230 says websites are not liable for third-party content. In practice, Section 230 merely serves as a free speech fast-lane. Under Section 230, websites can reach the same inevitable conclusions they would reach under the First Amendment, only faster and cheaper. Importantly, Section 230 grants websites and users peace of mind knowing that plaintiffs are less likely to sue them for exercising their editorial discretion—and even if they do—websites and users are almost always guaranteed a fast, cheap, and painless win. That peace of mind is especially crucial for market entrants posed to unseat the big tech incumbents.With that, it seems that Americans haven’t fallen out of love with Section 230, rather, alarmingly, they’ve fallen out of love with the First Amendment. In case you’re wondering if you too have fallen out of love with the freedom of speech, consider the following:If you're upset that Twitter and Facebook keep removing content that favors your political viewpoints,Your problem is with the First Amendment, not Section 230.If you're upset that your favorite social media site won't take down content that offends you,Your problem is with the First Amendment, not Section 230.If you're mad at search engines for indexing websites you don't agree with,Your problem is with the First Amendment, not Section 230.If you're mad at a website for removing your posts - even when it seems unreasonableYour problem is with the First Amendment, not Section 230.If you don't like the way a website aggregates content on your feed or in your search results,Your problem is with the First Amendment, not Section 230.If you wish websites had to carry and remove only specific pre-approved types of contentYour problem is with the First Amendment, not Section 230.If you wish social media services had to be politically neutral,Your problem is with the First Amendment, not Section 230.If someone wrote a negative online review about you or your business,Your problem is with the First Amendment, not Section 230.If you hate pornography,Your problem is with the First Amendment, not Section 230.If you hate Trump’s TweetsYour problem is with the First Amendment, not Section 230.If you hate fact-checks,Your problem is with the First Amendment, not Section 230.If you love fact-checks and wish Facebook had to do more of them,Your problem is with the First Amendment, not Section 230.And at the end of the day, If you hate editorial discretion and free speech,You probably just hate the First Amendment... not Section 230.

If anyone's to blame for this latest Erdogan related debacle, it's the thin-skinned "leader" of Turkey, R.T. "Gollum" Erdogan. In fact, I'd be hard pressed to find anyone else to blame if the Dutch government hadn't been an enabler of this bad behavior.Back in 2018, the Dutch government, inexplicably, decided to prosecute one of its own citizens for "insulting" a world leader located in an entirely different country. For whatever reason, the Dutch government has yet to wipe its "insulting a foreign leader" law from its books and that's the weapon Erdogan wielded to engage in extraterritorial protection of his easily bruised skin.A law may be on the books, but there's nothing compelling a country to enforce it, especially when the request comes from the Turkish consulate on behalf of an insulted foreign leader who, as the word "foreign" specifies, resides in another country altogether.Having set this stupid precedent, the Dutch government has to take some of the blame for recent developments, which involve President Erdogan targeting a member of the Dutch government over some online besmirchment.

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous response to the warnings that Twitch sent out to users who were hit by RIAA takedown demands, which prompted them to "learn about copyright law":

Five Years AgoThis week in 2015, the fight over the CISA cybersecurity bill was on, but it looked like Facebook was secretly on the wrong side of this somewhat-disguised surveillance bill (a true purpose that was occasionally admitted if you looked in the right places). But none of this stopped the Senate from rejecting all the amendments that would have protected privacy and passing CISA with a 74-21 vote. Elsewhere, the EU was working on net neutrality rules that were full of loopholes and other problems. Meanwhile, the DOJ was saying Apple should decrypt customers' phones because the company still owns their copies of iOS, James Comey was blaming violent crime on citizens with cameras, and the Library of Congress released new DMCA anti-circumvention exemptions that were a complete mess.Ten Years AgoFive years earlier in 2010, in the same week, there was a prime example of a DMCA exemption mess when we noted that jailbreaking iPhones was legal, but jailbreaking an Xbox could land you in jail for three years. The Lenz v. Universal case was moving forward as Universal argued that the dancing baby video was not obvious fair use, a judge ordered Limewire to shut down entirely, and Myriad Genetics officially appealed the ruling that invalidated gene patents. The US was basically saying it would just ignore anything in ACTA it didn't like, while a group of law professors was urging Obama to drop support for the agreement and we were looking at how it could create insanely broad new criminal copyright liabilities. And we had an early mention of the brewing controversy around a little company you might have heard of, at the time still known as UberCab.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2005, some prominent technology commentators were still missing the point of the rise of amateur content online, while the online world of self-published movies was set to take off and even television networks were, ever so slightly, starting to grasp the need for change. The mobile web was still being hampered by attempts to section it off and pre-decide how it would work, while mobile email was beginning to move beyond the world of BlackBerry (and BlackBerry seemed to have suffered a bit of a glitch in the UK that got the devices temporarily banned by the BBC). MP3 player makers who weren't Apple were complaining about the Apple-induced shortage of flash memory, and Google abandoned its attempts to appease authors and publishers and went back to scanning books after a temporary pause.

We've discussed Billy Mitchell a couple of times here at Techdirt, both times due to his overtly litigious nature, rather than his apparent video game playing prowess. See, Mitchell is rather well known primarily as the record holder for video game scores, including briefly holding the Guinness World Record for a Donkey Kong high score, until he was stripped of it. See, Twin Galaxies, an official tracker of such video game records, determined based on video evidence that Mitchell wasn't playing an official version of the arcade cabinet of the game. Upon being stripped of his records, Mitchell sued for... defamation. Oh, and he also sued the Cartoon Network over a very clear parody depiction in part inspired by his gregarious personage.But back to the defamation suit, which Mitchell filed against Twin Galaxies. He recently got the court allow him to proceed to trial after Twin Galaxies brought an anti-SLAPP suit to the court.

Summary: Wikipedia is well known as an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. This has enabled a massive corpus of knowledge to be created, that has achieved high marks for accuracy, while also recognizing that at any one moment some content may not be accurate, as anyone may have entered in recent changes. Indeed, one of the key struggles that Wikipedia has dealt with over the years is with so-called “vandals” who change a page not to improve the quality of an entry, but to deliberately decrease the quality.In late 2015, the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, announced an artificial intelligence tool, called ORES (Objective Revision Evaluation Service) which they hoped might be useful to effectively pre-score edits for the various volunteer editors so they could catch vandalism quicker.

In the week leading up to a potentially extremely consequential election, Congress is once again setting its sights on its favorite whipping boy, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.Section 230 clarifies that users are responsible for the content they post online, not the websites that host it. Yet, this simple law was the subject of a hearing which brought the CEO’s of Twitter, Google and Facebook to the hill to be questioned over the law. These companies have been blamed for everything from increasing hate speech online, promoting election disinformation, and censoring conservative speech.Seemingly sensing the winds of change are blowing against them, some of the companies brought to the hill have acquiesced that Section 230 will be reformed and will support some changes to the law. What exact changes to the law they will support remains unclear, but what does have clarity is that this tactic is a monumental mistake.The problem is supporting the reform of Section 230, or even changing the law, will do nothing to get Congress off their back, as any change to the law will fail to address the concerns of those demanding reform. If anything, changing Section 230 will only exacerbate those problems, leading to further scrutiny and calls for reform.Examine the standard Democratic and Republican complaints. Democrats are concerned that there is far too much hate speech, disinformation, and fake news allowed on various platforms. They want the websites to proactively remove more content they believe is poisoning the civil discourse.Republicans, meanwhile, are upset that websites are removing too much content. Twitter blocked the posting of the Hunter Biden laptop story for days, leading to claims of election interference. Similarly, posts from the satirical Babylon Bee have also been subject to removal. These actions place no doubt in the minds of many on the right that big tech is out to censor them.Listening to these complaints, it seems Section 230 is the cause of both too much and not enough content being removed? How can this possibly be?One thing is certain--the problem is not Section 230. The problem lies with the fact that platforms aren’t conforming to one side or the other’s content moderation preferences. But rather than admitting that, both sides are using Section 230 as a pretext to haul the companies before Congress and question them on moderation decisions.It’s likely that our political leaders already know this. If, by chance, they were able to agree and Section 230 disappeared tomorrow, websites would be left with two choices. They can moderate at an incredibly high rate to attempt to avoid liability, thus angering Republicans. Or, they can choose to not moderate at all, leaving any conspiracy theory, offensive speech or disinformation up, which would certainly anger Democrats.Any other proposal that attempts to cut the baby in half will similarly fail to leave both sides happy, and we will be stuck right back where we started. Giving in to these political demands is a mistake. The Congressional approval rating remains dramatically low, while technology companies are more popular than ever in wake of COVID-19. The general public does not care about this issue, and reforms will not fix the problems of those that have a bone to pick with certain tech companies. Any changes to Section 230 will not only fail to get Congress off their back, but they also threaten the very internet ecosystem that has made them rich and enriched the lives of people across the globe.Congress should leave Section 230 alone, and tech companies should be prepared to fight back against the disinformation spouted about the law.The law is working exactly as intended.Eric Peterson lives in New Orleans where is he the Director of the Pelican Center of Technology and Innovation

Broadband is in a state of disarray in America. This was the case long before COVID-19 brought the world to its knees earlier this year. Roughly a third of Americans have no access to broadband internet, with the majority stating cost as the most important obstacle. Even in highly connected urban areas, such as New York City, a lack of connectivity impacts millions of residents. According to Mayor de Blasio’s Internet Master Plan, 40% of New Yorkers lack access to home or mobile broadband, including roughly 20% who lack access to both.Many of these internet black out zones are in low income and minority communities. As the coronavirus pandemic set in, internet accessibility became more crucial than ever. However, as schools transitioned to online learning, many children were unable to participate – and continue to face the same challenge today, months later. Our community at NYC Mesh is fighting to bring digital equity to all communities of NY, and our solution is simple: provide internet to everyone. As COVID makes our society ever more digital, I believe our solution provides a meaningful model for how grassroots movements can shape the connectivity landscape.At NYC Mesh we are developing strategies to improve internet accessibility, by creating an open Wi-Fi wireless and fiber network in three boroughs – and more to come. Since NYC Mesh was founded in 2014, it has nearly doubled in size every year. However, like many other organizations, COVID took a toll on our ability to expand the network and service members.At the beginning of the year, NYC Mesh had about 500 successful nodes on the network – rooftop antennas connecting residents online and further expanding the reach of our community infrastructure in the city. The network was blanketing lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, with plans to begin connecting residents in Queens. Community meetings were filling rooms and teams of volunteers were at the ready to carry out seven installs a week, update our supporting webpage, participate in hackathons, perform maintenance and keep the network running, or any other of the many tasks involved in bridging community organizing and connectivity.As with the rest of New York, COVID forced NYC Mesh to adapt, and quickly. We did so by acting locally: the weeks before New York’s shelter in place order entered into effect, volunteers attempted to connect immediate neighbors, anyone in walking distance that we could connect. Ultimately, however, COVID forced the organization to limit its work to only emergency maintenance or circumstances when a new member had no other means to get online.Despite these limitations there were other ways we could help. NYC Mesh operates almost entirely on the suggested contributions of its members. We don’t speak the language of “service cutoffs,” billing, fees, or other creations of for-profit ISPs. When members of our community lost a job or simply had to prioritize other expenses in their life, they could rest assured that they wouldn’t lose their connection online. Of course, as with groups across the nation, our monthly community meetings transitioned online; PPE became a requirement for all in-person site visits and installations; and we added digital training videos and maintained an extensive online doc to help educate our new members.We started taking in requests for new installations again in June and the number of install requests have once again reached about seven a week. While some of our regular volunteers have had to step back as a result of the COVID shutdown, new volunteers have stepped forward, who have brought with them amazing contributions to help continue the expansion of the Mesh. While COVID may have slowed down NYC Mesh’s operations, we still continue to pursue our goal of bringing digital equity to all New Yorkers.Digital learning was an integral part of education long before the coronavirus and its importance is only increasing. As the need for broadband access rises, the gap in internet access has become more evident, and the consequences more severe. Coronavirus provided the perfect example of how the lack of broadband access can put many, especially children at risk. Children, especially children of color, are receiving less days of instructed learning than their more privileged peers. Prior to COVID, a child could go to an after-school program or library to get online. Now, most of these facilities are closed, limiting the options of those without internet at home to receive an education.NYC Mesh is here to organize, empower, and connect, which is why we’re partnering with the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) to expand the mesh network into public housing and enable free, fair, and community-based internet access to residents. The people of these communities face many obstacles, a lack of broadband access being one of the most severe yet overlooked. Having access to the internet at home means it will be easier for residents to apply for jobs online, work remotely, and access safety net benefits. Most importantly, it allows children to receive a full education during this pandemic. With this partnership, some of the most vulnerable members of our population will gain access to the internet, bringing us one step closer to digital equity for all New Yorkers.As we face yet another potential wave of COVID, it is clear that digital equity must be the goal in order to ensure that all New Yorkers can be successful. Employment opportunities, safety net access, and education, will increasingly become dependent on having internet access. Without stable broadband access, the gap between rich and poor widens, and the circle of poverty will continue for the next generation of children of color. Thanks to the efforts of NYC Mesh and other community-run and community-first organizations who have stepped up to tackle this challenge like Silicon Harlem or The Point, we are closer to bringing digital equity to the City of New York and ensuring that no child receives a lesser education, because of their parents' inability to pay a monthly internet bill.Terique Boyce is an organizer with NYC Mesh and resident of NYCHA housing. He works towards achieving greater representation of people of color in the tech industry and bridging the digital divide in NYC.

Everyone knows about President Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal, but you might now know as much about another huge scandal that preceded that one -- involving Nixon meddling, for political purposes, in an antitrust case by his Justice Department against a large "tech" company/conglomerate at the time. The case involved ITT trying to buy up some smaller companies, and the DOJ brought an antitrust case against them. The scandal part was that ITT approached the White House and worked out a deal: ITT would donate $400,000 (roughly $2.5 million today) to the 1972 Republican National Convention, and Nixon would get the DOJ to drop the case. Which he did. As the Nixon tapes eventually revealed, he called up then deputy Attorney General Richard Kleindienst and said:

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For the better part of the last decade, cable and broadcast executives tried their hardest to pretend that their industry wasn't facing a massive tectonic shift. First, they tried to insist that users flocking from expensive bloated cable bundles to streaming or over the air broadcasts didn't actually exist. Then, when it became very clear cord cutting was a major trend, they tried to pretend it was just something irrelevant, poor nobodies did. Then, when evidence made it very clear that wasn't true either, many executives pretended they'd seen this coming all along.They didn't see it coming. In fact they routinely doubled down on all the kinds of behaviors that created the problem in the first place, like mindless rate hikes, bullshit fees, cheaping out on customer service, and fixating on megamergers instead of customer welfare. But after 2019 and 2020 wound up being the bloodiest years on record for cord cutting, they sure as hell see it now.Case in point: industry insiders now expect 25 million U.S. households to cancel their pay-TV service over the next five years. That's on top of the 25 million homes that have already cut the cord since 2012. The hope now is that the trend stabilizes somewhere around the 50 million traditional TV subscriber mark. Granted there's no evidence they'll be right about this either, and either way there are some hard times in store for the sector all the same:

There's something in the air. Call it TDS. Trump Derangement Syndrome. To acolytes of Trump, this means everyone opposed to Trump will find some reason to blame anything on him. But the derangement affects the acolytes more than it affects his opponents.Former free speech warriors have started calling for government interference in private companies' handling of third-party speech. Lawyers that used to defend even seemingly indefensible people from bogus defamation lawsuits are now filing bogus defamation lawsuits of their own. Far too many Trump fans are convinced the First Amendment should override moderation decisions by social media companies. Some of these Trump fans are actually in the legislative business, which means they have the power to harm -- perhaps permanently -- the First Amendment and the immunity given to social media companies that extends to moderation decisions.It's hypocrisy. It's blatant. And it just keeps spreading. Recently, Newsweek allowed Will Chamberlain to publish an op-ed in support of direct government interference in private companies' moderation efforts. That name might not ring a bell, so let's take a look at Will Chamberlain.Chamberlain now works for the "Internet Accountability Project." It describes itself this way:

Earlier this month, it was reported that the "rule of law" Trump administration was (yet again) violating the law. In this particular case, Trump appointee Michael Pack -- the CEO of the US Agency for Global Media -- was breaching a codified "firewall" to target Voice of America reporters he believed were too critical of Trump and his actions.The "firewall" was erected to prevent exactly what Pack was doing. It was supposed to allow VOA reporters to act independently, rather than be subjected to the whims of presidential administrations. Breaching the firewall allowed Pack and the White House to control the narrative by sidelining or targeting journalists who expressed anti-administration sentiments elsewhere. Specifically cited were "retweets" and "likes" of social media posts criticizing Trump, as well as certain VOA pieces that highlighted the negative aspects of administration efforts.Apparently, the problem was the law, not the lawbreaking. As NPR reports, Michael Pack has removed the law that prevented him from meddling in the day-to-day operation of Voice of America. It was done like most unseemly moves by governments are done: late in the day during a very busy news cycle.

Mere days ago, we discussed the bonkers path Twitch chose for itself in dealing with a flood of DMCA takedowns issued by the RIAA. The whole episode screamed of panic. Rather than dealing with DMCA takedowns via the normal method -- taking down the content, providing the content maker with a path for a counternotice, and then putting the content back if no lawsuit was filed -- , Twitch, instead, took the extraordinary action of simply and permanently nuking the videos in question. It then, rather brazenly, informed the content maker it had done so and advised them to "learn about copyright law." In fact, given its actions, there is some question as to whether or not this is all enough to have lost Twitch its safe harbor protections.Regardless, it would be an understatement to suggest that this pissed off the Twitch community. The public backlash was both swift and severe, with content producers openly wondering if it was time to march off to a different platform entirely. Well, the very next day, Twitch began teasing a new offering coming in November and promoted this tease by releasing a sought after emote to all Twitch users.

So Quibi, the Hollywood dream of creating a new "professional" video streaming service by throwing $1.75 billion at Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman and hoping they could create something, lasted all of 199 days before announcing that it was throwing in the towel (even though it apparently still has a chunk of that cash on hand, which it will be handing back to some investors). As we noted when it launched, Quibi is the perfect example of Hollywood thinking about the internet. It overvalued the content (and believed that you got the best content by throwing money at big names), and completely undervalued the internet and the fact that the killer application of the internet is community and communication.For decades now, we've pointed out time and time again that Hollywood seems to view the internet through the lens of their existing industry -- one built up with a few giant gatekeepers who "greenlight" what content gets made -- and that the content they pick must be financed with ungodly sums of money. I'm reminded of the former NBC exec who quizzed me years ago about how to make sure his company could keep making $200 million movies. As I've noted repeatedly in the 15 years since I was challenged over that, the whole question is wrong. No one in the tech industry demands that others explain "how do we keep making $5,000 computers." The industry looks at how best to serve customers -- and often looks for creative ways to do it cheaper and more efficiently, rather than just setting a cost and tossing cash into it.Quibi was the result of this kind of hubris: taking the Hollywood approach to an internet world. And it showed.As James Surowiecki highlights in his own post-mortem, Quibi is basically the opposite of what a compelling internet service is because it relies on the idea of the brilliant visionary anointing the best content, rather than letting it bubble up via the wisdom of the crowds.I find it notable that Quibi shut down the week that there was a flood of stories (and TV commercials) featuring Nathan Apodaca, the Idaho potato farmer who's random TikTok video of himself on a skateboarding heading into work (after his truck broke down) while drinking cranberry juice from a giant bottle and singling along to Fleetwood Mac went super viral. It was also a "quick bite" video, but it was basically the anti-Quibi. That one random video going viral has even brought Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams" back onto the charts 43 years after the song came out.That's the power of the internet. It allows anyone to create. It allows anyone to share. And out of all of that, it allows some amazing content to bubble up, because tons of people like it -- and not because some super rich Hollywood dude decides "this is what the people want."

Last month we wrote about an absolutely ridiculous situation in which the DOJ sought to insert itself into the long-running defamation case brought by E. Jean Carroll against Donald Trump. As we noted, Carroll's defamation claims seem fairly weak. They're part of a pattern of somewhat sketchy defamation claims in which someone accuses someone of something awful, and then the accused person denies it -- and the accuser says the denial is defamation.In this case, Carroll claims that Trump sexually assaulted her years ago. Trump denied even knowing her. She sued for defamation. Again, the case seems pretty weak and I think Trump has a decent chance of winning. However, despite trying, Trump and his personal lawyers failed to stop the discovery process, in which she's seeking a sample of his DNA as part of proving her case. At that point, the DOJ stepped in, citing the Westfall Act, which requires the DOJ to step in and take over cases if the Attorney General "certifies" that the actions being sued over were done by a federal employee while "acting within the scope of his office or employment." And the key bit here: because of sovereign immunity, you cannot sue the federal government for defamation. So if the court allowed the DOJ to step in, in place of the President, the case would then need to be dismissed immediately.And, thus, the argument the DOJ made was that Trump denied sexually assaulting Carroll... as part of his job as President of the US. As we pointed out in our original post, there were all sorts of reasons why this was ridiculous. Ken White did point out that there are some rulings on the books saying that politicians answering questions from the press about their personal lives is part of their job description, and thus it was possible that a judge might actually side with the DOJ.However, the judge did not do that at all. In a 61 page, very detailed ruling, Judge Lewis Kaplan (last seen here berating copyright troll Richard Liebowitz) rejected basically every last bit of the DOJ's argument. He did so on two key grounds. There was the reason that lots of us expected: that denying you sexually assaulted someone is not part of the job of being President:

It's been more than a half-decade since it made headlines, but the NSA's hardware manipulation programs never went away. These programs -- exposed by the Snowden leaks -- involved the NSA compromising network hardware, either through interception of physical shipments or by the injection of malicious code.One major manufacturer -- Cisco -- was righteously angered when leaked documents showed some of its hardware being "interdicted" by NSA personnel. It went directly to Congress to complain. The complaint changed nothing. (Cisco, however, changed its shipping processes.) But even though the furor has died down, these programs continue pretty much unhindered by Congressional oversight or public outcry.One legislator hasn't forgotten about the NSA's hardware-focused efforts. Senator Ron Wyden is still demanding the NSA answer questions about these programs and give him details about "backdoors" in private companies' computer equipment. The DOJ and FBI may be making a lot of noise about encryption backdoor mandates, but one federal agency is doing something about it. And it has been for years.Not only has the NSA installed its own backdoors in intercepted devices, it has been working with tech companies to develop special access options in networking equipment. This allows the agency to more easily slurp up communications and internet traffic in bulk. Senator Wyden wants answers.

We've noted for years that broadband usage caps are bullshit. Leaked ISP documents and public executive statements have repeatedly made it clear that usage caps and overage fees are just glorified price hikes on the backs of captive customers, only made possible due to industry monopolization (and the regulatory capture and Congressional corruption that lets them get away with it).This was a problem for decades, made worse during a crisis in which broadband is essential for survival (health care, work, remote learning). The Trump FCC made some performative, empty gestures toward this problem earlier this year when it announced an entirely voluntary pledge with ISPs, who agreed they'd temporarily stop charging late fees or imposing usage caps. Many ISPs not only ignored their promise, but it was only a few months before most ISPs returned to business as usual, namely ripping off captive customers with spurious fees and surcharges thanks to the accountability vacuum its net neutrality repeal created.Apparently trying to "help" shed some light on the problem, the Wall Street Journal this week penned a piece discussing usage caps and how they impact ordinary people. Unfortunately, half the story is filled with bullshit industry claims that simply aren't true. Like here, where the Journal amplifies a purported expert who tries to claim that usage caps are necessary to recoup network investment costs:

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While much of yesterday's Senate Commerce Committee hearing was focused on the pointless grievances and grandstanding of sitting Senators, there was a bit of actual news made by Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey. As we discussed earlier this week, Zuckerberg agreed for the first time that he was in support of Section 230 reform, though he declined in his opening remarks to specify the nature of the reforms he supported. And while the original draft of Jack Dorsey's opening testimony suggested full support of 230, in the given remarks he also suggested that Twitter would support changes to Section 230 focused on getting companies to be more transparent. Later in the hearing, during one of the extraordinarily rare moments when a Senator actually asked the CEOs how they would change 230, Zuckerberg also focused on transparency reports, before immediately noting that Facebook already issued transparency reports.In other words, it appears that the "compromise" the internet companies are looking to throw to a greedy Congress regarding Section 230 reform is "transparency." I've heard from a variety of policymakers over the last few months who also seem focused on this transparency issue as a "narrow" way to reform 230 without mucking up everything else, so it seems like mandating content moderation transparency may become "a thing."Mandating transparency, however, would be a dangerous move that would stifle both innovation and competition.Cathy Gellis has covered this in detail in the past, and I addressed it in my comments to the FCC about Section 230. But it seems like we should be a little clearer:Transparency is important. Mandated transparency is dangerous.We've been celebrating lots of internet companies and their transparency reports going back to Google's decision nearly a decade ago to start releasing such reports. Over time, every large internet company (and many medium ones) has joined the bandwagon. Indeed, after significant public pressure, even the notoriously secretive giant telcos started issuing transparency reports as well (though they often did so in a secretive manner that actually hid important details).So, at the very least, it certainly looks like public pressure, good business practices, and pressure from peers in the industry have already pushed the companies into releasing such reports. On top of that, many of the internet companies seem to try to outdo each other in being more transparent than their peers on these reports -- which again is a good thing. The transparency reports are coming and we should celebrate that.At the very least, though, this suggests that Congress doesn't need to mandate this, as it's already happening.But, you might say, then why should we worry about mandates for transparency reports? Many, many reasons. First off, while transparency reports are valuable, in some cases, we've seen governments and government officials using them as tools to celebrate censorship. Governments are not using them to better understand the challenges of content moderation, but rather as tools to see where more censorship should be targeted. That's a problem.Furthermore, creating a "baseline" for transparency reports creates two very large issues that could damage competition and innovation. First, it creates a clear compliance cost, which can be quite burdensome for new and smaller websites. Facebook, Google and Twitter can devote people to creating transparency reports. Smaller sites cannot. And while you could, in theory, craft a mandate that has some size thresholds, historically that leads to gaming and other tricks.Perhaps more importantly, though, a mandate with baseline transparency thresholds locks in certain "rules" for content moderation and creates real harm to innovative and different ideas. While most people seem to think of content moderation along the lines of how Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter handle it -- with large (often outsourced) content moderation teams and giant sets of policies -- there are many, many other models out there as well. Reddit is a decently large company. Yet it handles content moderation by pushing it out to volunteer moderators who run each subreddit and get to make their own content moderation rules. Would each subreddit have to release its own report? Would Reddit itself have to track how each individual subreddit is moderated and include all of that in its report?Or how about Wikipedia? That's one of the largest sites on the internet, and all of its content moderation practices are already incredibly transparent, since every single edit shows in each page's history -- often including a note about the reasoning. And, again, rather than being done by staff, every Wikipedia edit is done by volunteers. But should Wikipedia have to file a "standardized" report as well about how and why each of those moderation decisions were made?And those are just two examples of large sites with different models. The more you look, the more alternative moderation models you can find -- and many of them would not fit neatly into any "standards" for a transparency report. Instead, what you'd get is a hamfisted setup that more or less forces all different sites into a single (Facebook/YouTube/Twitter) style of content moderation and transparency. And that's very bad for innovation in the space.Indeed, as someone who is quite hopeful for a future where the content moderation layer is entirely separated from the corporate layer of various social media sites, I worry that mandated transparency rules would make that much, much more difficult to implement. Many of the proposals I've seen to build more distributed/decentralized protocol-based solutions for social media would not (and often could not) be fit into a "standardized" model of content moderation.And thus, creating rules that mandate such transparency reporting for companies based on the manner in which those three large companies currently release transparency reports would only serve to push others into that same model, creating significant compliance costs for those smaller entities, while greatly limiting their ability to experiment with new and different styles of moderation.

On Wednesday morning the Senate Commerce Committee held a nearly four hour long hearing ostensibly about Section 230 with three internet CEOs: Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook, Sundar Pichai from Google, and Jack Dorsey from Twitter. The hearing went about as expected: meaning it was mostly ridiculous nonsense. You had multiple Republican Senators demanding that these CEOs explain why they had taken actions on certain content, with some silly "whataboutism" on other kinds of content where action wasn't taken. Then you had multiple Democratic Senators demanding these CEOs explain why they hadn't taken faster action on pretty much the same content that Republicans had complained some action had been taken on.The shorter summary was that Republicans were demanding that their own lies and propaganda should be left alone, while Democrats demanded that lies and propaganda should be removed faster. Both of these positions are an anathema to the 1st Amendment, and the people advocating for them on both sides should be embarrassed. While each platform has the right, under the 1st Amendment, to host or not host whatever speech they want, based on whatever policies they set, Congress cannot and should not, be in the position of either telling companies what content they need to host or what content they must take down. And yet, we saw examples of both during the hearing. On the Democratic side, Senators Markey and Baldwin, among a few others, pushed the companies to take down more content. This is extremely troubling on 1st Amendment grounds. On the Republican side, many, many Senators demanded that certain content should be unblocked -- in particular the NY Post's Twitter account.And there were a few (very limited) good points from both sides of the aisle. Senator Brian Schatz noted that the entire hearing was being done in bad faith by Senate Republicans to try to bully the companies into not removing disinformation in the final week of the election. He noted that, while he had many questions for the three CEOs, he would not participate in this "sham" by asking questions during this particular hearing. Kudos to him. On the Republican side, Senator Jerry Moran noted that changes to Section 230 were the kinds of things that the three companies before the Committee could handle, but which would hamstring smaller competitors (to be fair, Jack Dorsey made this point in his opening testimony as well).But I wanted to focus on some specific grandstanding by a few key Senators who made particularly ridiculous statements. And, I will point out upfront that these all came from Republicans. I'm not pointing that out because I'm "biased" against them, but because of the simple objective fact that it was these Republican Senators who made the most ridiculous statements of the day. The key theme between them was a ridiculous sense of grievance, and a false belief that the company's moderation practices unfairly targeted "conservatives." Except nearly all of them assumed that because more Republicans were moderated, that was proof of bias -- and not the idea that, perhaps, Republicans do more things that violate the policies of these companies. In the same manner that I'm picking on mostly Republican Senators here, that has more to do with their own actions, than any personal "bias."What was most frightening, however, in the comments from these Senators is how at home they would have been in the days of Joseph McCarthy. Multiple Senators demanded to know about the personal ideological viewpoints of people who worked for these companies. Both Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg correctly pointed out that they do not ask their employees about their political leanings (Pichai stated that they hire from all over, implying that there was a diverse ideological pool within their workforce).It is stunning and dangerous for Senators to be demanding to know the political leanings of employees at any particular company. Senators Mike Lee, Ron Johnson and Marsha Blackburn all asked questions along these lines. Lee, who historically has been aligned with libertarian viewpoints, completely misrepresented the content moderation policies of these companies and insisted that they disproportionately target conservatives. They do not. If conservatives are violating their policies more than others, then that's on those people violating the policies, and not on the policies themselves. Lee also fell into the ridiculous myth that Google's policies directly targeted conservatives in demonetizing The Federalist. As we've discussed multiple times, that's utter bullshit. We received identical treatment to The Federalist. So did Slate and Buzzfeed. Lee, ridiculously, argued that the companies saying -- accurately -- that they do not target moderation decisions based on ideology perhaps violated laws against "unfair or deceptive trade practices." Basically because Lee falsely believes these companies target conservative speech (because he's so deep in his own filter bubble he doesn't even know it hits others as well), that they're engaging in deceptive practices.Lee demanded that each company list "left leaning" accounts that had received similar treatment, and the various CEOs promised to get back to him, but this was a nonsense argument.However the most ridiculous part of Lee's grandstanding was his disingenuous framing of content moderation. He started asking about how these companies "censor" content. In the past, we've discussed how moderation and censorship differ, but Lee stretched the definition to insane levels:

The DHS's hunger for data cannot be satisfied by mandatory facial scanning at airports, cellphone scraping at border checkpoints, or the dozens of government databases crammed full of personal info it has access to. It needs more. So, it's asking for more. More mandatory collection of biometric info from millions of people, including US citizens.The EFF is asking the government to dump this program. It has sent its comment [PDF] on the DHS's proposal, something it had to squeeze in during the agency's truncated comment period. The EFF notes this is not only unusual, but seems calculated to limit public objection to its sweeping, expansive data-hoovering plan.

If it seems like there are more stupid trademark battles per capita fought in the restaurant industry, it's not because you're crazy. It's very much a thing. Whether it's Taco John's wanting to own "Taco Tuesday", McDonalds insisting only it can call a fish sandwich a "filet o' fish", or two Brazilian restaurants fighting over the rights to use image of a fire in their logos, the common theme you should notice is how these battles are all over things that are descriptive or generic. And, yet, these fights rage on.Take, for instance, a burger joint in Texas sending a cease and desist notice to another burger joint in Texas for daring to use the word "juicy."

Summary: In almost every country in which it offers its service, Facebook has been asked -- sometimes via direct regulation -- to limit the spread of "terrorist" content.But moderating this content has proven difficult. It appears the more aggressively Facebook approaches the problem, the more collateral damage it causes to journalists, activists, and others studying and reporting on terrorist activity.

Representatives Malinowski and Eshoo and have introduced a Section 230 amendment called the “Protecting Americans from Dangerous Algorithms Act” (PADAA). The title is somewhat of a misnomer. The bill does not address any danger inherent to algorithms but instead seeks to prevent them from being used to share extreme speech.Section 230 of the Communications Act prevents providers of an interactive computer service, such as social media platforms, from being treated as the publisher or speaker of user-submitted content, while leaving them free to govern their services as they see fit.The PADAA would modify Section 230 to treat platforms as the speakers of algorithmically selected user speech, in relation to suits brought under 42 U.S.C. 1985 and the Anti-Terrorism Act. If platforms use an “algorithm, model, or computational process to rank, order, promote, recommend, [or] amplify” user provided content, the bill would remove 230’s protection in suits seeking to hold platforms responsible for acts of terrorism or failures to prevent violations of civil rights.These are not minor exceptions. A press release published by Rep. Malinowski’s office presents the bill as intended to reverse the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit’s ruling in Force v. Facebook, and endorses the recently filed McNeal v. Facebook, which seeks to hold Facebook liable for recent shootings in Kenosha, WI. These suits embrace a sweeping theory of liability that treats platforms’ provision of neutral tools as negligent.Force v. Facebook concerned Facebook’s algorithmic “Suggested Friends” feature and its prioritization of content based on users’ past likes and interests. Victims of a Hamas terror attack sued Facebook under the Anti-Terrorism Act for allegedly providing material support to Hamas by connecting Hamas sympathizers to one another based on their shared interests and surfacing pro-Hamas content in its Newsfeed.The 2nd Circuit found that Section 230 protected Facebook’s neutral processing of the likes and interests shared by its users. Plaintiffs appealed the ruling to the US Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case. The 2nd Circuit’s held that, although:

When it comes to the goal of ensuring all Americans have affordable and reliable Internet access, we are pretty much stalled. Sure, the FCC will make noise every year about our quest to bridge the digital divide, but it has focused solely on for-profit private solutions. And while there are many hundreds of good local companies making important local investments, the FCC has tended to throw the most money at the few extremely big ones (the same big ones that are on the other side of the revolving door at the FCC for most employees, whether staff or political appointees.)In response to the pandemic, companies like Charter and AT&T have been on their best behavior and done their best to extend connections more widely than they did in normal times. It was far from good enough, and culminated in AT&T asking for billions more in subsidies than it was already getting. Tens of millions of Americans are not particularly attractive to the big ISP monopolies, either because they live in more rural areas or low-income neighborhoods of cities.We need better broadband policies — but we have to learn from what is actually working. Second, we should never write another check to AT&T or bankrupt disasters like Frontier and Windstream. Third, thoughtful, practical solutions moving ahead will need to address the broadband gap in whatever form it takes. As NDIA notes, broadband policy that focuses solely on the infrastructure challenge is structurally racist — it ignores the needs of millions of families of color in urban areas that face other obstacles to getting online.Community networks are commonly assumed to be best at connecting those neglected families, and many are showing their worth during this Covid-19 pandemic. But Covid-19 is just the latest piece of evidence that these types of networks should play a much larger role in expanding competition more generally — whether they take the form of municipal networks, cooperative-owned networks, or take some other non-profit form.For those living in areas covered by electric cooperatives, there are plenty of recent examples which can provide local leaders inspiration and offer lessons learned. For example, 15 out of 25 electric co-ops in Mississippi are currently pursuing fiber projects that will connect tens of thousands over the next handful of years. 35% of residents in the state lack basic broadband, but $65 million in CARES funding is bringing fiber to folks with nothing today.Other electric cooperatives have also stepped up to the plate. OzarksGo, based in Arkansas, responded to the public health crisis by wiring fiber to Wi-Fi hotspots on parked school busses last spring to help community members with no access get online. The New Hampshire Electric Cooperative, after a rousing local organizing campaign by local residents citing COVID, in part, saw its board vote unanimously to create a separate entity to pursue broadband after previously refusing to.City-owned networks also provide an abundance of examples. North Carolina’s Greenlight network, operated by the city of Wilson, has developed several programs to connect those commonly left behind. This includes offering 40 Megabit per second (Mbps) symmetrical connections to families in public housing for $10/month, and a flexpay program to give anyone a pay-ahead option that is essential for families with bad credit or irregular income. Greenlight also accepts cash, essential for the unbanked. All of these programs have remained in place or expanded since last spring. When the pandemic hit, Greenlight also accelerated its lifeline approach, keeping people connected with a basic option for $10/month.Chattanooga again made national news in July when it unveiled an initiative called HCS EdConnect to provide free 100Mbps symmetrical Internet access to every student in the Hamilton County School District on free or reduced lunch. That’s 17,700 homes and 32,000 students, and the initiative has pledged to keep those connections free for the next ten years. The $15 million project serves as a case study in decisive action, thoughtful municipal leadership, local investment, and fundraising by all involved: Hamilton County Public Schools, municipal network EPB Fiber, nonprofit The Enterprise Center, and city and county governments. The first large chunk of students has already been connected.Covid-19 has amped up growth in community networks. In San Rafael, California, a coalition between local government, Marin County, and the nonprofit Canal Alliance came together initially in a bid to get students online for the upcoming school year, but the effort quickly turned into a free Wi-Fi network for the entirety of the Canal neighborhood. Residents there make up the backbone of the area’s service economy and have some of the worst Internet access options in what is otherwise among the wealthiest counties in the state. The city plans to keep it online and free indefinitely.The same thing is happening in McAllen, Texas, with the city’s IT department spearheading an effort to put 5,000 access points around the city of 140,000 on water towers and power poles, with dozens of neighborhoods already blanketed in free Wi-Fi. Like in San Rafael, all residents of McAllen will enjoy the benefits of the public network forever, with the city committing to maintaining it with a regular budget appropriation from here out.And over the summer in Champaign, Illinois, when it became clear that hundreds of District 4 students on the north side of town in Shadowwood Mobile Home Park were unable to attend classes because they lacked Internet access, the city partnered with local broadband provider i3 and wireless hardware manufacturer Mesh++ to solve the problem. Solar-powered Wi-Fi routers were installed on power and light poles to create a free, neighborhood-wide wireless network so that more than 250 students could log on and access course content and join live classes via Zoom. Champaign, too, plans for their network to be permanent, and is pursuing similar projects in apartment housing in other parts of town.San Rafael, McAllen, and Champaign are by no means alone, with similar efforts unfolding in Cleveland, Ohio, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, San Antonio, Texas, and elsewhere. These should be celebrated, but we can still do better. The networks can be more ambitious - like Wilson and Chattanooga — and more numerous.The Barriers to Community Broadband TodayFirst, 19 states have laws on the books which significantly restricts the ability of communities to build networks responsive to their needs, even though we know this results in slower broadband adoption. The HEROES Act would eliminate these barriers, but it remains stalled in the U.S. Senate. If Democrats take the Senate, they say they will wipe out these barriers, but the big monopolies are undoubtedly undermining that determination as you read this.Second, the federal government should invest more money, more intelligently in the effort. While a good chunk of the first round of the USDA’s ReConnect Program grants went to cooperatives and other municipal networks working to expand Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) networks, it’s not enough. ReConnect has given out a little more than $800 million in funds, but the need is far greater and it is focused solely on areas where no broadband is physically available. Far more people are stuck in areas with networks that are too expensive for their income. The upcoming RDOF auction will give cooperatives a shot at billions in subsidies, but there is no program for the millions of low-income families that need affordable options.Third, and perhaps most importantly, we see a lack of ambition, commitment, and imagination by local communities in solving the problem. AT&T demands more subsidies while withdrawing its services in rural areas, and Mississippi asks why nearly $300 million in subsidies didn’t improve access for most. But most local government officials still think AT&T or their state or the federal government will suddenly recognize decades of failure and swoop in to connect local businesses and residents.Communities have to step up. Recognizing the value of local action alone isn’t enough. Elected officials and community stakeholders will have to confront the above obstacles and an array of others as well. If the states or federal government actually offer help, it will most likely be financial aid to local efforts, not a magic button that doubles the rate of connectivity in the United States.There are a wide variety of models, and the Covid-19 pandemic has provided renewed popular support for better networks. In some cases, local officials have recognized the need for, at the minimum, a local plan. But in most cases, local residents need to push their local government to investigate the options. The Michigan Moonshot effort offers both a playbook and plenty of background information, templates, and more. There is no better time to start organizing locally for better networks.Christopher Mitchell is the Director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative whose work focuses on telecommunications — helping communities ensure the networks upon which they depend are accountable to the community. He is a leading national expert on community broadband networks.Ry Marcattilio-McCracken is a Senior Researcher with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s Community Broadband Networks Initiative, where he writes about municipal networks, cooperatives, and broadband policy around the United States.

The DOJ really wants to make El Presidente's antifa dreams come true. The anti-police brutality protests have been cast by the administration as a leftist conspiracy to… um… demand better policing and better police officers. In addition to sending federal officers to clamp down on unrest in "Democratic" cities, the FBI has been sending analysts to crack phones taken from protesters in hopes of finding some sort of antifa org chart the feds can use to dismantle this "group."If you think it's weird a free world government would be obsessed with tracking down people fighting fascism, you're not alone. Seems like the time and effort would be better utilized to neutralize the threat posed by homegrown extremists, many of whom align themselves with white supremacist movements. But this is what this Administration is diverting resources to, even when available evidence suggests the antifa movement isn't filled with dangerous individuals.More evidence suggests the government might want to focus on another loose assortment of anti-government individuals: the so-called "Boogaloo Bois." If antifa is a collective in the loosest definition of the word, the Boogaloo Bois are similarly unstructured. Small groups exist but there's no organizational head to bring down or nationwide structure to dismantle. While the president complains about "violent" BLM/antifa protesters, real violence is being perpetrated by actual anarchists Trump has never criticized publicly.

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Last month we wrote about Zoom blocking an online event by San Francisco State University because one of the speakers was Leila Khaled, a Palestinian activist/politician. 50 years ago she was involved in two airplane hijackings. As I noted in the post, this blockade was somewhat different than social media companies doing content moderation. Zoom is not hosting content, but rather just transmitting it, and thus is more akin to telecommunications infrastructure, and that raises significantly more questions about what it means when it starts reviewing the content of calls.Indeed, because of this move, a series of online seminars were setup to discuss this very issue -- and they were done on Zoom. The company apparently got wind of one such event at NYU and refused to let it happen:

What does it look like when Trump's swamp devours itself? Look no closer than a battle between Peter Thiel backed Rivada Networks and incumbent telecom giants AT&T and Verizon.Last week, anonymous "senior administration officials" told CNN that Rivada was lining up to grab potentially tens of billions in extremely valuable middle band spectrum via a no bid contract. The sources told the outlet that Rivada, which is financially and politically backed by Trump/GOP allies like Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, and Thiel, is pushing to bypass the normal FCC approval process to gain access to a massive windfall:

The FBI is still creating terrorists -- finding loud-mouthed online randos to radicalize by hooking them up with undercover agents and informants seemingly far more interested in escalating things than defusing possibly volatile individuals.The Ninth Circuit Court has, fortunately, decided to roll back a ridiculous sentencing enhancement added to another one of the FBI's homegrown extremists. The terrorism enhancement in this case was triggered by this: the defendant's opening of six social media accounts for alleged ISIS sympathizers.The details of the case -- contained in the court's reversal [PDF] of the sentencing enhancement -- show Amer Alhaggagi was a bit of a troll. The son of Yemeni immigrants, Alhaggagi was born in California but spent a lot of his life traveling back and forth to Yemen to spend time with his mother. He was raised in a Muslim home but that upbringing didn't really make him a Muslim. He didn't seem to have much interest in adhering to the religion's rules and instead drifted towards the internet, where he developed a "sarcastic and antagonistic persona."This is how things were going before the FBI got involved:

While we've covered the growth of esports throughout the world for some time, it's also true that the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in that growth accelerating with incredible speed. Back in March and April, when states began shutting down because we had -- checks notes -- 20k to 30k new COVID cases per day, esports really took off. Due to shut downs, IRL professional and college sports shut down too. The result is that Americans who thirst to watch competition dove headlong into esports broadcasts, with participation and viewership clipping at 20% growth month over month. An entire economy sprung up around the industry as well, with streaming companies and broadcasters catching up to the sudden rise in interest.But if you thought this was a uniquely American thing, you're wrong. And if you think that this wave is going to crest once we're all putting vaccine needles in our arms, I think you're wrong about that, too. An Indian sporting news site recently did an interview with the CEO of Skyesports, a prominent esports company in India. While you will have to forgive some translation wonkiness in them, two questions and answers jumped out at me as I read the interview. The first was about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on esports' growth in India.

This shouldn't be much of a surprise, unfortunately, but it appears that once again Facebook is the first to crack under political pressure, and has decided to sell out the open internet and free speech online. In testimony Mark Zuckerberg is planning to give tomorrow to the Senate Commerce Committee, he's going to say a few nice things about Section 230, immediately followed by him saying the company now supports reforming the law. The praise for Section 230 is accurate, but it doesn't much matter when he takes it back immediately:

With the pandemic spurring a mass switch to remote working for many people, especially those at tech companies that were among the earliest adopters of the trend, discussions about the uncertain future of Silicon Valley have resurfaced. This week, tech reporter and VC partner Kim-Mai Cutler joins the podcast to discuss whether the pandemic-driven changes in how we work will drive a mass-exodus from California and threaten its status as an innovation hub.Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via iTunes or Google Play, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

Just about a year ago the courts partially upheld the FCC's hugely unpopular net neutrality repeal. But it also kicked some aspects of the repeal back to the FCC. Most notably, the courts stated the Ajit Pai FCC couldn't ban states from protecting consumers if the FCC is no longer interested in doing so. The courts also noted that the FCC (surprise!) did little to no research into how the repeal would impact public safety or efforts to bridge the digital divide (the latter being kind of important in a massive pandemic in which affordable access is essential to survival) and urged the agency to try again.Knowing full well the polls suggest their good times may soon be coming to an end, the FCC this week voted along party lines (pdf) to ignore the court's complaint, pat itself on the back for a job well done, and double down on its Orwellian-titled "Restoring Internet Freedom" repeal. With no changes to it whatsoever: